Howard Hodgkin quotes:

Collecting has been my great extravagance. It's a way of being. I collect for the same reason that I eat too much-I'm one of nature's shoppers.

I want my pictures to be things. I want them to be made up of marks that are physically and individually self-sufficient.

Matisse was very clear about saying that you have to blow your own trumpet and explain yourself, which I think has been slightly forgotten.

I once was interviewed and got so exasperated that I said, 'What do you want, a shopping list?' They kept asking, 'What's in this picture?'

I don't really have a historical overview of my work at all. I'm not an art historian. I don't see that there's this period and that period.

I don't think you can lightly paint a picture. It's an activity I take very seriously.

A collection makes its own demands. Many artists have been collectors. I think of it rather as an illness. I felt it was using up too much energy.

Eventually, a collection ceases to be a personal indulgence and assumes its own identity. In fact, it becomes a thing in its own right - rather like Frankenstein's monster.

I am happy for people to talk about my pictures, but I wish devoutly that I was not expected to talk about them myself.

I'm vulnerable to criticism. Any artist is, because you work alone in your studio and, until recently, critics were the only way you'd get any feedback.

My language is what I use, and if I lost that, I wouldn't be able to say anything.

The picture surface recedes just as much in the 20th century as it did in the 15th. The techniques of making pictures have hardly changed.

A lot of people... are afraid of pictures which have visible emotions in them. They feel calmer in front of pictures which are placid.

I dont think you can lightly paint a picture. Its an activity I take very seriously.

I find old copies of National Gallery catalogues, which are written in the dryest possible prose, infinitely soothing.

I think words come between the spectator and the picture.

In England, it's thought to be morally suspect to worry about what your surroundings look like.

I am isolated as an artist, not as a person.

I don't look at the work of my contemporaries very much; I tend to look at pictures by dead artists. It's much easier to get near their paintings.

When I finish a painting, it usually looks as surprising to me as to anyone else.

I'm very envious of the few artists who are any good and still do portraits.

A painting is finished when the subject comes back, when what has caused the painting to be made comes back as an object.

I look at my pictures, and I think, 'Well, how did I do that?

I never think that anything I do is courageous.

I think that words are often extraneous to what I do.

In the United States there has been a kind of a structure in the Modern art world. The New York School was nearly a coherent thing-for a minute.

It is simply impossible to control a large painting with the edge in the same way that you can control a small one.

It takes a long time for the gleam in the eye to turn into something solid.

My friends tend to be writers. I think writers and painters are really all the same-we just sit in our rooms.

My language is what I use, and if I lost that, I wouldnt be able to say anything.

My pictures really finish themselves.

Passion lies between one mark and the next, and also within all of them.

The only way an artist can communicate with the world at large is on the level of feeling.

To be a painter now is to be part of a very small, endangered species.

You keep on balancing and balancing and balancing until the picture wins, because then the subject's turned into the picture.